


The Very Wrath of Love

by archea2



Category: Chronicles of Narnia (Movies)
Genre: Angst and Romance, Bath Sex, Bittersweet, Book/Movie: Prince Caspian, Book/Movie: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Edmund being his diplomatic self, M/M, Mutual Pining, Rivals to Friends to Lovers, Wrestling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:47:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25065622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archea2/pseuds/archea2
Summary: Edmund may not want to understand, but Edmund totally understands.(Takes place in the early stage of theVoyage of the Dawn Treader. My takeaway from the film (Susan's letter, Lucy's vision) was that Peter was in America with Susan and their parents rather than studying with Professor Kirk, so I'm going with this premise.)
Relationships: Caspian & Edmund Pevensie, Caspian/Peter Pevensie, Edmund Pevensie & Peter Pevensie
Comments: 6
Kudos: 57
Collections: Little Black Dress Exchange 2020





	The Very Wrath of Love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lucymonster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucymonster/gifts).



> Dear lucymonster, 
> 
> I owe you my recent and unexpected pleasure in discovering the Narnia films, especially the way they fleshed out the Pevensies' dynamic, both among themselves and with Caspian. Here's hoping that my take on two lonely kings and their never-asked-for-this-but-loyal-to-the-bone confidant will please you.

_They are in the very wrath of love, and they will go together._

Shakespeare, _As You Like It_

In this her maiden voyage, the _Dawn Treader_ treads lightly. At day: after dusk the waves heave strong, heave breathy, tilt their hammocks closer - and then not. He can feel how the swell inclines him towards Edmund, their hips nearly touching despite the fabric that cradles them, only to be pulled apart on the sea’s downbreath. If Edmund finds it odd, he doesn’t say. Caspian finds it infuriating that the sea should out him, should force his body into that horizontal mimic of what was once his heart’s progress, only to miscast the other King.

What Edmund does say is, “Peter used to be seasick, you know?”

Caspian turns over too fast, the creak of rope too telling.

“He did?”

“Rather. Dad took us all to Normandy, once, before the War - I was very small. We crossed the Channel, that’s one name for our sea, and the girls loved it. Su vowed herself to swimming right away. Peter… spent all of his ferry time ‘speaking Welsh to the fish’, Dad said, though I didn’t get it then.”

“I thought there were no Talking -”

“And Lucy, she was still in Mum’s arms, but she kept staring at him, you know? Ever so impressed. And at one point” - Edmund lifts his chin, laughs into the sky - “she said, ‘Peter, your face is _such_ a nice green!’ And he was frightfully sick, really, but he smiled. That’s Pete for you.”

“Ah,” Caspian says. 

If he closes his eyes, the sea will rock him more palpably. The strong, unconfined sea. When he was made king, Miraz’s castle among the coronation gifts, Caspian chose the highest room for himself so he could leave it at will - steal, once again, up the stairs - and sleep in the sweet-breathed open air. His guard was puzzled. Caspian had to explain the best he could, about the arrows piercing his canopy, that made it impossible henceforth for the King to suffer a curtained bed. 

(He’d hushed about Gyr, his beloved hawk, who had shrilled itself raw at the sight and died from a cracked heart.)

“Not for me,” he says now, the anger roused in his rib cage. Part of Caspian will always be confined, however far he roams the sea, and always pummel at the cage. He thinks Edmund knows; Edmund, who the tattered chronicles of yon said was good at reading people and rerouting their worse impulses to a better end. Once, Edmund arm-wrestled Peter out of despair during the latter’s duel with Miraz, and Caspian watched. Perhaps Edmund is bringing up Peter’s gentleness now so Caspian can be angry: at his past, for orphaning him, at Peter, for denying him the smile he squanders on those three that have him, _and_ their father still, _and_ had Aslan Himself crowning them. Anger comes to Caspian as relief, oiling his heart; easing it into delivering Peter’s name, because so much of their borrowed time was spent flaring up at each other. 

He wonders if Edmund, only half a boy now, knows this.

“He stood up to the Witch for you,” Edmund confides to the air. “And she nearly got the better of him. Trust me, there’s no better way to bond with my brother.”

Caspian breathes deep and hard in the night. “I know. And made sure he knew too.”

For Peter had stood stock still, then, his chest still arching but frozen, his face rigidly vulnerable from its exposure to the chill of guilt. And Caspian - shy, hesitant Caspian - had acted on a spark. Had made his left hand rise and trail its wound across Peter’s face, Peter’s cheek and mouth, ensuring that the fresh warm blood craved by the Witch be pledged to Peter instead. A barbaric gesture, bespeaking Caspian’s piracy lineage; yet one that anointed Peter’s face in Aslan’s heraldic red before the High King’s shame could burn him out in the next moment. 

Peter’s lips had gasped under the blood. 

Almost at once he’d said _Aaah!_ , that clear-voiced grunt that Caspian’s nurse had told Caspian was the High King’s wonted battlecry, though it rang more like a boy’s release being wrung out of him last thing at night. And he had grabbed Caspian’s jerkin. The joust that followed was release, too, even though it had left the two of them hard and breathless, their thighs interlocked too tight to squeeze a drop of mercy, even after Caspian leveraged them aground. They had rutted in a desperation of youth; pushed and rubbed their bodies onto a floor that was all stone like it was their given mission to strike it to fire. Caspian was the leaner boy, Peter’s face and body not yet lanked by the added years, but Peter had conjured up his once-manhood in retaliation, finding and delivering thrusts that no schoolboy could have achieved. Had placed his mouth on Caspian’s; had imparted salt, muscle, and Peter’s acceptance of a bloodline that severed Caspian from Telmar and joined him to Peter’s loins, Peter’s tumescent breath, against every known dynastic law.

Somehow they had crawled into the core of the How, right between the broken halves of the Stone Table. And there they had contorted as on a bed. Faith and outrage reaching out to each other across the split, no one the wiser.

And their members had been swollen to the hilt, yet neither spending - an unrecorded feat against the odds of youth and close quarters. Again and again, Caspian’s arousal had found its summit only to ebb under Peter’s silent _Fall back!_ , while he had and held Peter’s mouth. Time itself had rotated to their throb. And then... and then, no more time. The stone walls had sung with running steps, and Peter had rolled away from him, his growl unsated but proclaiming him free of shame.

“He never thanked you?” 

Caspian starts, stares, but Edmund’s eyes are on the sky and its giant portulan of stars. Caspian, who didn’t know about blackout curtains when he offered to have their hammocks hung on the main deck, is glad he did. Every gesture towards Edmund glows double, because they’re what Peter would have done. 

“For what? He was the bestower - he gave Narnia over to me.” 

“Before that. The duel.” 

“The -”

“Look,” Edmund says with wry, Edmundlike patience. “My brother never fought to give anyone a jolly good show, though his right hook did have an audience appeal. He only ever fought to find the fighter in him. And the rows at school were pretty foul - _I_ should know - but they weren’t Ettinsmoor quality. Only a pack of kids blowing their tops over who got the best corner in dorm and the dollop of jam in their rice pudding. But then, you called him. And gave him Miraz. 'Fight to the death', all that. Next best thing to a Giant.”

“He did tower over me as a child. Had me whipped when I refused to eat boar.” Ever since Caspian’s nurse had told him how the Boars had fought for Aslan tusks and teeth, he’d never felt quite the same about venison. 

“I bet he did. So Peter had to stop turkeycocking and do the right thing - and not for himself. Not for pride. For you. That changed him all right.” Edmund pauses to shift position, letting Caspian see the pale blob of his face under the stars. Yet it is lit from the inside. “It was being your champion that made him himself again. So he should have rendered thanks, verily” - the old Narnian speech, resurfacing with the smile. 

Caspian smiles too. “Verily, he did. He gave me his sword.”

“A token of himself.” 

Caspian thinks of Rhindon’s long hard line. He doesn't tell Edmund how he sometimes aligns it, bared and dangerous, to his inner thigh when he pleasures himself. Instead he nods, the tears welling into his eyes. Welling up, all the way from...

“He made a gash in my heart” - before his mind is made up to speak. “I thought the sea would help. I thought only something magnificent would do, if I was to fill the gash.”

“Do you want me to tell him?”

Caspian isn’t too sure. It is one thing to tend a wisp of beard after gazing too long at a stone effigy in Cair Paravel, Caspian’s challenge to the gap of time. It is another to let Peter know that Caspian still yearns for him against time and tide. 

“Tell him..."

"Yes?"

"Tell him you found me surrounded by water.”

Back then, after their joint victory, they had decreed an interval for cleansing. The battle wrath had not been stripped off them, not quite; rather, it had morphed into play fight, each making a struggle of letting the other divest him of shift and tabard, before they entered the wooden tub filled with water and sweet green herbs, the Trees’ tribute. Sheets had been hanged over the tub, making a little tent, and Peter - after a consulting glance - had reached out to close them. Then he'd clasped Caspian’s scarred hand and helped him into the tub. They had sloshed their way to each other, wildly; and Caspian had pushed into the softest places in Peter’s body, bent on making him connect with his own vulnerability instead of Peter projecting it onto his siblings, the custodians of a tenderness he would not claim for himself. 

This time, it took a mere embrace to make Peter spend, to the point that Caspian wondered if they had both met the fray with a body straining at the root - the intoxicated pulse from their first encounter intact and fuelling their swords’ ardour. But now Peter was flailing under his hand; his clear-voiced groans wrenched from the sum of him, again, again, again, his release loud enough for all to hear. Caspian too must have cried out; blurrily, as he kissed Peter and sucked in Peter's cry, Peter's release, as far down as it would go to become his. It took Peter a long minute to raise his face from the curtain of Caspian’s hair, but when he did, the change was made consummate. Now Peter looked drained, but peaceful. Caspian felt raw, but regal. 

They had kissed again, their mouths dry with joy. 

“My uncle…” Suddenly, Caspian heard himself speaking without the abrasive Telmar stress. “My uncle would ask, how can two kings consort?” And they had hooted like owls, mixing naughtiness with a great thirsty hope when Peter, brash Peter, said, “Well, you have the horn!”. Which Caspian had. And would blow in his many times of need, not just physical (though his body, running with water and a thicker, pearlier splash, already begged to differ). When lonely, when listless, he would call for Peter. And Peter would find him - and the relief would wash over them, again, and again, violent, and lustral, and theirs. 

But when they left the tent, their hands joined in exultation of their bright pact, there had been a brighter presence and a voice saying “Peter, Son of Adam. We need to talk."

“You gashed him pretty good too,” Edmund is saying. “I mean, we talked of Narnia all through the Christmas vac. We rose early, all four of us, and Su toasted buns on the gas fire for Lucy. And they talked about you, the girls. But not Peter. Only when it was us in our room, or the boiler room at school, where a chap can find privacy away from all the other chaps - and they bullied Peter like anything after Christmas.”

“Why?”

“He would not fight on their terms. No longer. But he wouldn’t say Pax either. Lion’s Mane, the number of times I've had to patch him up, top to toe...”

 _‘Twas I changed his terms_ , Caspian marvels as the sails above him rattle themselves with the wind. He whispers, “Tell him I’m restless. Tell him part of me will never rest, for all the peace in Narnia.”

If Edmund hears him, he doesn’t betray it.

“And it was all set that he’d study with the Professor because Dad is set on Peter going to The Other Place - no, not Narnia. Oxford. Thats what Eustace calls it, don’t ask me why. But Peter said no. Stood his ground like an Oak of Old. And there was so much bother and pother - but in the end they had to take him along, too, and let him help with the war effort in America. Funny,” Edmund adds. 

“What?”

“Peter crossing a sea just when you did. He must have felt pretty... restless."

Up above the sky is letting go of the night; while the air below them is shot with voices calling to and fro, muffled by the breeze. They will sail on, Caspian thinks, but only so far: every quest comes to an end, Aslan sees to it. And perhaps, if he is docile and takes a wife (ethereal) (serene) (unearthly), He will open a door onto Peter’s world and let Caspian get wrathful one last time - let him ply Rhindon on the bullies’ backs for Peter’s sake. Or perhaps Reepicheep, whose reedy voice can be heard floating down from the Dragon’s Head, _will_ steer them into Aslan’s Country, where Aslan said Peter was assigned. If Caspian gets there first... if he... perhaps...

“I’ll tell him,” Edmund says quietly, and Caspian shuts his eyes so the day doesn’t have yet to become.


End file.
